Magicians have a concept known as “closing the doors”. It’s an extremely complex, multi-stage form of lying, basically. You have a good trick, but to make it great, you go around and you spot any avenues of thinking which could lead the audience to work out how it might be done, and then you lock these avenues off, one at a time. It’s misdirection, but a sort of nth dimension misdirection.
Cocoon reviewPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: Geometric InteractivePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 29th September on PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox X/S. Also available on Game Pass.
Cocoon does something similar. Or maybe it’s the same thing but through the looking glass, inverted, turned upside down. If magicians close the doors of possibility to stop you from solving a puzzle, Cocoon closes all necessary doors in order to help you solve one. It’s closing the doors not in the name of misdirection but, well, direction. And it does it so skilfully I almost always miss those doors closing in the first place.
This is a challenging puzzle game, in other words, but it’s never a jerk. And the reason it’s never a jerk is all those doors it has closed behind you. If an area’s no longer needed, it quietly locks it off. If a puzzle needs you to trek so far for a solution but no further, it will gently place a perimeter around the location. If you need an item, it will find a wordless way to highlight it. Wordlessness! That’s a central element here, and we’ll come back to it later. For now, what this all means is that when you’re stuck, it’s always clear where you’re stuck, and it’s always clear that the solution will be nearby. It will just require some alien logic to find it and implement it. And it turns out that alien logic is pretty easy to uncover when the parameters are so well defined because all those misleading doors have been closed for you.
This is rather a chilly, practical spot to start in on such a game, which I genuinely think is the best game I’ve played this year. But I’m starting here because I know me, and I know I would hear about Cocoon and think: that sounds brilliant, but it’s probably quite a lot of effort? It sounds like an ingenious slog? It sounds, ultimately, like the kind of game I am too stupid for? But with subtle direction implemented throughout the adventure, Cocoon reveals itself as that most holy of all puzzle games – a game so smart that it can make its players feel smart too. I was delighted, frankly.